In Theaters Now – Page 14

‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ – A Missed Opportunity for a Strong Female Lead

By far the most disappointing aspect of film is the verbal sexual objectification of April O’Neil. She may not be scantily clad, but the male characters (mostly Mikey and Vern) in the film frequently make sexual comments to her, to which her response is complete and total silence. For an actress who has expressed plenty of feminist quips and spoken so adamantly about “refusing to flirt on set,” even going into detail on how she handles it, saying “you never have to feel like someone has power over you,” I’m surprised to not see that influence on this character. There was no script when she signed on to star in the film, and from interviews I’ve watched it seems like the storyline was a collaboration between her, the director, and the producers.

This is a guest post by Melanie Taylor.

There has been no escaping the onslaught of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles promotion that’s been inundating every media outlet over the past few weeks. The hype has been huge and the hate has been heavy, even from the beginning back when there was first talk of Michael Bay making the turtles into aliens. Everyone protested Michael Bay “ruining their childhood.” Many fans also lamented the presence of sexpot actress Megan Fox filling the shoes of journalist April O’Neil, the protagonist of the film and the human connection to the outside world. Hate and hype aside, the film carried on, and the cast was filled out by Will Arnett playing Vernon Fenwick, her goofy cameraman sidekick, and William Fichtner as Eric Sacks, the obligatory evil genius.

I, for one, was excited to see Megan Fox in a film that does not revolve around her sexuality. In promotion for the film, Fox says that her character is “courageous” and “ambitious…fighting for the truth,” a Joan of Arc type of character. The director, Michael Liebesman, echoes her sentiment, stating that he didn’t want April to just be eye candy, that she is meant to be an integral part of the Turtles’ survival and mission. While the film starts strong and leads with April aggressively interrogating a source, determined to find an opportunity to report something beyond a fluff piece, the “ambition” teeters off and is never fully realized.

Megan Fox as April O'Neil — Megan Fox as April O’Neil

The first half of the film we follow her character in her quest to uncover the truth, get a story, and stop the destructive Foot Clan that has been causing havoc in the city, but in the second half of the film April completely abandons her career ambitions and is basically just along for the ride in what seems like an endless 45 minute long action scene. I say “first half” and “second half” because there is no third act in this film. There is no wrap up of the main character’s goals or problems, only a stop-the-bad-guy-and-say-goodbye-to-the-Turtles sort of ending. However, you can see from released B-roll footage that at one point there was a third act of some kind at some point.

On top of the lack of a third act, the film almost seemed like a rip off of the 2002 Spiderman storyline — bad guy scientist has a plan to take over the city and kill people with some kind of chemical and the good guys must stop him. The film was practically a parody of the action superhero genre, which actually made the generic dialog more tolerable to think of it that way.

By far the most disappointing aspect of film is the verbal sexual objectification of April O’Neil. She may not be scantily clad, but the male characters (mostly Mikey and Vern) in the film frequently make sexual comments to her, to which her response is complete and total silence. For an actress who has expressed plenty of feminist quips and spoken so adamantly about “refusing to flirt on set,” even going into detail on how she handles it, saying “you never have to feel like someone has power over you,” I’m surprised to not see that influence on this character. There was no script when she signed on to star in the film, and from interviews I’ve watched it seems like the storyline was a collaboration between her, the director, and the producers.

Vern jokes about the nice view of her rear end when she’s leaning out a window, and Mikey makes comments throughout the entire film about being attracted to her, including implying that she’s giving him a boner. Her response is to stare blankly at him like a personality-devoid sex object. Not once does she tell him to cool it, chill out, stop, or respond with some witty come back at least. Aside from the fact that he’s a teenager and she’s a grown woman, she’s there to get a story and help the turtles, not give them boners.

April leans out of a window to snap a pic

Although she does have moments of strength where she saves them, the Turtles don’t seem to care about her beyond thinking she’s hot. Fox has repeatedly stated that she doesn’t mind being the sexy aspect of a film and while a little sex appeal in an action film makes sense, it’s a bit of a contradiction to talk about April being this great role model for girls because she confronts danger and has career goals, both great traits, when that character is also painfully silent in the face of unwanted sexual attention. You can have a sexy character who is not a silent sex object.

This was a missed opportunity for Megan Fox to showcase a truly strong female action hero. When Mikey makes comments about how she can always find him “here” as he points to her “heart” aka chest, she could have shut him down with something like, “Cool it, kid. I’m here to get a story!” or something more clever like what she does in real life. Instead we got deer in the headlights silence as the audience laughs at how much he is drooling over her.

For what it’s worth, this film technically passes the Bechdel Test – April has conversations with her female boss, played by Whoopi Goldberg, and her female roommate in two cute scenes that get a laugh, but the film and entire franchise still suffers from the “Smurfette Principle.”

Shredder, the whitewashed bad guy with boomerang-like knife hands, and Splinter, the rat father of the turtles, could not have been less developed and less interesting as characters. There was little to no backstory for them. Splinter was hideous to look at and Shredder had no personality. Megan’s performance was enjoyable, but kind of weak compared to her performances in This is 40 and Friends With Kids. I’ll give her a pass though, because she was pregnant throughout the entire film, nauseous almost every day on set. Pretty badass to make an action film while pregnant.

The saving grace for TMNT was the humor of jokester Michelangelo. He got the most laughs and was the only thing to make the nonstop, over-the-top action that dominates the second half of the film bearable. He provides the much needed levity to the excessive machismo of the film. Another positive aspect of the film was Will Arnett as Vern, who was charming and likable, even if he was that sort of annoying guy-friend-who-can’t-take-a-hint type. Sexual objectification and lack of a character arc aside, Megan Fox comes off as very likable as well in this film. She’s determined and brave and her backstory and connection to the Turtles gives her character heart substance.

The film ended on a note that very much implied a sequel, and considering the big box office numbers of opening night, a TMNT 2 is inevitable. Let’s just hope that in the second installment, at the very least, that April learns to shut down sexual harassment and gets to reach her career goals and have some kind of character arc along with the Turtles and the bad guys.

Melanie Taylor graduated from CSUN with a degree in screenwriting. She writes for her blog The Feminist Guide to Hollywood and is also a musician who shares her music on soundcloud.com/phantomcreatures. Follow her on twitter: twitter.com/tigersnapp.

The Superman Exists and She is American: Scarlett Johansson in ‘Lucy’

First off, busting the industry perception that men will never flock out to see a movie about a woman, Lucy’s audience was split evenly between the sexes. Moreover, it’s a female led action flick without a romantic subplot or scenes that unnecessarily exploit the lead actress’s sex appeal.
It’s a great showcase for Johansson, as she runs through Europe showing off her action chops and her steely determined expression, and an entertaining delivery system for a mix of pseudo-science and scraps of intriguing philosophy, but feminist game changer it is not.

Posters for Lucy showed only Scarlett Johansson — Posters for *Lucy* showed only Scarlett Johansson

Lucy’s release is a bit of a David and Goliath story.

In one corner, you have a traditional action-adventure based on an age-old legend with universal familiarity and a male lead, who’s proven himself by carrying several films, while in the other, is a female led action film, with a completely original story and pretensions towards high art. Add to that a lead who’s never carried a blockbuster, an R-rating and European provenance and Luc Besson’s film, Lucy seems risky.

While both films were successes, with Lucy earning a cool $44 million its opening weekend and Hercules, $29 million, the big story on their release was the industry’s surprise that the great hero, Hercules, was beaten by “a girl.” Headlines posed it as a physical fight: Lucy alternately beat-up, slayed, pummeled, over muscled, and overpowered Hercules, and that was something to gawk at.

Of course, Hercules couldn’t be defeated by a mere “girl.” She has to be a super-powered engine.

Way back in April, when the film’s first trailer was released, Lucy went viral. The story of an American party girl transformed by a drug that lets her access 100 percent of her brain, it looked like a crazy, brutal ride with Scarlett Johansson morphing into a merciless and unstoppable god-like killer; like Bradley Cooper’s well-received Limitless, but with a woman holding a gun. Even the mind-expanding drug at the centre of the story is gendered feminine, a synthetic form of CPH4, a hormone produced by pregnant women.

It all sounds rather wondrous. A female led-action film is always something to take notice of (they’re as rare as unicorns), especially when it’s successful. Sure, every time a film with a female lead dominates at the box office, feminist critics have to cheer it on a bit regardless of its quality, because of its potential as a game changer (though I’m not sure how many times we need a success before it will actually change the game), but Lucy has a lot going for it.

First off, busting the industry perception that men will never flock out to see a movie about a woman, Lucy’s audience was split evenly between the sexes. Moreover, it’s a female led action flick without a romantic subplot or scenes that unnecessarily exploit the lead actress’s sex appeal.

It’s a great showcase for Johansson, as she runs through Europe showing off her action chops and her steely determined expression, and an entertaining delivery system for a mix of pseudo-science and scraps of intriguing philosophy, but feminist game changer it is not.

American party girl Lucy is manipulated by her boyfriend into becoming a drug mule

Lucy is set up like a rape revenge film, a controversial idea in of itself. Our heroine is manipulated into working as a drug mule by her new boyfriend, who forces her to deliver a briefcase by flirting with her and then handcuffing her to it. Next, she’s lifted off the ground and abducted from a hotel lobby by a group of mobsters who refuse to explain anything to her and promise to kill her and her family if she refuses to cooperate. After being knocked unconscious, she wakes up in a strange bedroom stripped to her underwear to find her body has been violated, except, instead of raping Lucy, her captors have cut her open and sewn a bag of drugs inside her body which she will have to deliver for them. Through all this, Lucy is helpless and relentlessly victimized; she has no idea how to save herself from these men who have claimed ownership of her body and her will.

Lucy wakes up in an unfamiliar room, in a scene reminiscent of a woman discovering she has been drugged and raped

Until one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, which causes the drugs to leak into her body, inadvertently unlocking her mind and eventually giving her superhuman abilities like telekinesis, telepathy, invulnerability to pain, mind control, and time travel as the area of her brain she is able to access rises. Along with this, comes a Greek god’s sense of morality, as she begins to see human beings as insignificant creatures that she can kill for simply being in her way.

And what is Lucy to do with her superpowers? Does she want to save herself from the effects of the drug, which promise to kill her within 24 hours? Does she want revenge or to stop others from being victimized as she was? No, she just wants all the CPH4 left so she can accumulate all human knowledge and build a supercomputer. Really, that’s the plot.

Lucy gains superhuman abilities and invulnerability

Though she does kill off the mobsters, it’s only incidental to her goal. In fact, she helps the police arrest the other drug mules, people who have been victimized just as she was, with no concern to the punishment they will face.

The problem with creating a god-like protagonist with no concern for humanity is that she has no concern for humanity. Lucy has no passion or anger about what has happened to her and after a few early scenes, there’s no reason to sympathize or identify with her. Because she no longer has human concerns, the stakes are no longer personal. Because she’s become so powerful, there’s also no struggle for her, no question of whether or not she will succeed. Lucy is an unstoppable force and her enemies are nothing more than bugs on a windshield. A good action film should have character development as well as fight scenes and explosions, and Lucy is sorely lacking in that department.

As an action heroine, Lucy wields a gun and kills without hesitation

Shortly after the drug leaks into her system, Lucy makes one final phone call to her parents, where she tearfully says goodbye and thanks them for raising her so well. This short scene is all we really get of Lucy’s past or of her humanity and once she hangs up the phone, she quickly loses any determination to stay alive or return to her old life. By the time she arrives at the apartment she shares with her friend, Caroline ( Analeigh Tipton), she is cold and impartial.

A film with an emotionless, inhuman god or robot figure only works when there is also a human character we are meant to connect and sympathize with–John and Sarah Connor to the unyielding Terminator. Here, Lucy tries to be both human and inhuman, giving us no real reason to care about her. Though she’s joined by a French police officer, Pierre Del Rio (Amr Waked), playing the usual female role of grounding their superhuman partner, he is given no backstory and we are given no indication that we are meant to switch to identifying with him. His purpose in the story is unclear as, though she kisses him in one scene, saying she needs him to keep her connected to humanity, but we never see this actually happen and the kiss is very dry and perfunctory, indicating he is not meant to be a romantic interest.

Morgan Freeman explains Lucy’s actions as she becomes less and less human

Morgan Freeman is also along for the ride as a scientist whose lectures on the human brain are paired with scenes of Lucy’s transformation as if she is his object lesson. Though Lucy apparently has surpassed his knowledge by the time she speaks to him and knows enough to criticize his theories, he is still posed as an expert who she needs to help her on her quest. By the last segment of the film, Lucy has lost so much humanity that she becomes nothing more than a beautiful object, a Marilyn Monroe mannequin, moved around and explained by men. As she sits silently in a chair absorbing CPH4 and watching spectacular effects only she can see, Morgan Freeman narrates what is happening to her. While her body transforms, she becomes less human, less verbal and therefore less of a character. By the film’s end, her physical form and anything that was specifically the human woman named Lucy cease to exist. Instead, she becomes a force of knowledge that exists “everywhere” and a supercomputer that the male characters can use, a literal object that will somehow save them, though what she hopes they will do with it is never explained.

In addition, there’s definitely some racism at work in the film, which is set in Asia and filled with Asian villains who violate a “‘pure white woman.” There is no real reason the crime story has to to take place in Taiwan aside from vague cultural perceptions that Asia is full of drugs and crime. In one scene, Lucy kills three men after they tell her they don’t speak English, suggesting that they deserved to die for not speaking her language, though she’s the one in a foreign country.

Set in Taiwan, the film shows Asian men preying on a white woman

The filmmakers appeared to take for granted that they would be viewed as progressive for using a female lead, but instead, merely transform the standard white savior from male to female without paying attention to the problematic idea of the white savior itself. Viewers who praise the film as feminist ignore the idea the idea that feminism does not only include white women.

Like any successful female led film, Lucy should also be looked at for its potential to change the media landscape. Scarlett Johansson definitely gives it her all and shows her potential as an action star, capable of helming a film even without her fellow Avengers. Perhaps Lucy’s success will lead to a solo film for her popular Black Widow character or to films for some of our other favorite superheroines.

On its own, Lucy is a cheesy and entertaining ride if you don’t think too much about it. It casts a woman in a superhuman role that women rarely get to play and never plays it as a surprise or irony that the person tasked with advancing the human race is female. That much is admirable.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Violette’: You Won’t See A Better Portrait Of Queer Women Artists This Year–Or Maybe Ever

So ‘Violette,’ a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like ‘Kings and Queen’) the author of ‘La Bâtarde’ (‘The Bastard’) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work ‘The Second Sex.’ In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the memoir Minor Characters, editor and writer Joyce Johnson describes the early Beat scene in 1950s New York, when she dated Jack Kerouac. Although she and the other women on the scene are frustrated with being the “minor characters” of the title, Johnson mentions one woman, a painter, married to one of the men in the Beat social circle as being the only woman artist she knew (including Johnson herself) who took her work as seriously as a man would. Although we see plenty of evidence today of women, including women artists like Kara Walker, having the type of acclaimed careers that were not open to them in the 1950s, we rarely see that reality reflected in films. A film that focuses on an artist and that artist’s work is usually about a man, whether it’s Ed Harris in Pollock or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, and he usually has a supportive, encouraging woman by his side who is the main guy’s champion and cheerleader, the filmmakers not seeming to give a shit that she was an accomplished artist as well: painter Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden) in Pollock and author Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) in Capote.

So Violette, a film which covers all of the 1950s (it begins in the 40s, before the end of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and ends in 1964) is a nice change in that it focuses on not one, but two women writers who work hard over a period of years to become successful artists (both critically and financially) in their own right. The two characters come from real life: Violette Leduc (played by Emannuelle Devos, whom some will recognize as the star of Arnaud Desplechin’s films like Kings and Queen) the author of La Bâtarde (The Bastard) and Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) who wrote (among many other books) the groundbreaking feminist work The Second Sex. In a Parisian parallel to Johnson, de Beauvoir was also the companion to Existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre.

Reviews of the film led me to believe it was a portrait of a woman who is a pathetic pain in the ass who also just happens to become an acclaimed writer, but the film is more complex than the tired trope of the woman whose career is more successful than her personal life. For one thing, Leduc’s career, for much of the movie, goes nowhere. After approaching de Beauvoir as a fan and handing her the manuscript she’s been working on, Leduc’s first book comes out in a limited edition, which means no one can find it in the bookstores, so it makes hardly any money. Her next few books barely sell more. A later novel is censored; after de Beauvoir lobbies the publisher, he agrees, as a compromise, to keep the part of Leduc’s novel that describes an abortion (based on an abortion Leduc herself had when she was briefly married) but excises the passages about a sexual relationship between two schoolgirls (also based on Leduc’s early life, which was later published as Thérèse and Isabelle).

De Beauvoir’s advice to Leduc, whether she takes a brief time away from entertaining guests at her apartment or joins Leduc for dinner at a bar is always the same: “Tell it all…You’ll be doing women a favor,” even as Violette acts out every “oversensitive” artist’s worst impulses, always assuming everyone is slighting her (while ignoring all protestations and gestures to the contrary), moaning that no one really cares about her and writing about herself that “Ugliness in a woman is a mortal sin.”

Male critics have, in the context of the film, commented on Devos’ “striking, broad features,” but I wish everyone, especially men, would agree to some sort of moratorium on discussing an actress’s attractiveness. Because no one asks, “Brendan Gleeson: hot or not?” With her hourglass figure (few women look better in a plain white slip), and Betty Grable hair, Devos, as Leduc, is as attractive, and, with her 40s-style high heels, royal blue coat, and matching scarf, as glamorous, as she was as the love-object who should’ve been charged with manslaughter in Kings and Queen. Photos of the younger real-life Leduc show she was not “ugly” either: labeling herself that way was just another instance of her periodic self-loathing. We’re so used to seeing in films beautiful actresses with messy hair or toned-down makeup pretending they don’t still look great, the movie was half over before I realized that the filmmakers (director Martin Provost wrote the script with Marc Abdelnour and René de Ceccatty) didn’t buy into Leduc’s description of herself either.

As happens with a lot of temperamental people, whether they are artists or not, Leduc’s emotional outbursts, though they are rooted in her own despair, end up working to her advantage. After Violette has a fit about being cast as the mother in his amateur film, a rich “collector” friend offers her a generous advance for her next manuscript. After she rants about not being able to support herself with her writing, de Beauvoir arranges for her to receive a stipend while she works.

Leduc falls in the same sort of obsessive, unrequited, desperate love with de Beauvoir that we see her demonstrate for her gay male companion at the beginning of the film (she’s attracted to his queerness, but he remains unmoved by hers). We get a reference to the novel de Beauvoir wrote about a ménage à trois of two women with a man, but while the film name-checks her male lovers, Sartre and American novelist Nelson Algren, nothing else in the film informs us that the bisexual de Beauvoir also had sex with women–though she never has an affair with Leduc, and keeps her at a chilly arms-length for much of the film. But saying the two women don’t have a relationship is wrong.

From their very first, brisk, business-like meeting about the manuscript Leduc has handed to de Beauvoir, de Beauvoir never ceases to encourage Leduc in her writing, suggesting improvements (like cutting out the character based on the gay guy Leduc was obsessed with) and encouraging her to explore themes taken from her own life in her next work. De Beauvoir, while not maternal with Leduc (like Leduc, de Beauvoir is not eager to play “the mother”) is the ideal mentor, perhaps because as one of the only women in her social circle of post-war writers and intellectuals, she was tired of being “one of the boys.” De Beauvoir is Leduc’s champion with publishers and is not above using her own fame to prop up Leduc’s. And she is, in her way, always on Leduc’s side. During a very bad period in Leduc’s life, de Beauvoir appears at her bedside, holding up a newspaper with a laudatory review of Leduc’s latest novel for her to see. De Beauvoir even, at one point, suggests to Leduc that she travel, which, in a roundabout way, leads to the peace Leduc finds at the end of the film. Throughout the decades de Beauvoir tells a disbelieving, depressed Leduc, “Screaming and sobbing will get you nowhere. Writing will.” By the end of the film not only do we see de Beauvoir was right, but more importantly, we see that Violette knows it too.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzhp2PCOWfI”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’: Almost as Weird as a Movie About Women

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ is flat-out aggressively weird (up to and including its gigantic EFF YOU of a post-credits scene reminding us of the grand history of weird comic book adaptations). It has capitalized perfectly on this moment of comic book blockbusters and consumers’ particular faith in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As a super-dork who loves her some space cowboys and space cowgirls and space nonbinary cow-wranglers, I just want to issue my most sincere and grateful slow clap. Way to take your moment, movie.

The cast of 'Guardians of the Galaxy' — The cast of *Guardians of the Galaxy*

Marvel Studios made another gigantic pile of money last weekend with Guardians of the Galaxy. Even though it is based on a property that could kindly be referred to as “obscure,” the Marvel name plus a great trailer plus a genius week-after-ComicCon release = big opening weekend. Even for a movie about Andy Dwyer, a green badass chick, a beefy guy painted like a brocade tablecloth, a cyborg raccoon, and a sentient tree creature all getting their space opera on over a purple ringpop of a MacGuffin.

Guardians of the Galaxy is flat out aggressively weird (up to and including its gigantic EFF YOU of a post-credits scene reminding us of the grand history of weird comic book adaptations). It has capitalized perfectly on this moment of comic book blockbusters and consumers’ particular faith in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As a super-dork who loves her some space cowboys and space cowgirls and space nonbinary cow-wranglers, I just want to issue my most sincere and grateful slow clap. Way to take your moment, movie.

Guardians of the Galaxy is so weird there are two chick on screen at one time! — *Guardians of the Galaxy* is so weird there are two chick on screen at one time!

And while Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t make straight A’s on the feminist scorecard, as expertly detailed by my Bitch Flicks colleague Andé Morgan, it still represents an important moment for feminist fans of genre flicks. First, this is the first Marvel movie with a credited woman writer, Nicole Perlman. Male-dominated movie studios seem to be just now wrapping their heads around the idea that women actually pay to see movies, and that’s not necessarily moving them to cater to what the female audience wants. Getting more women on the creative end is vital, particularly women like Perlman who can make bizarre material palatable to mainstream audiences, because comic books sources are never short on w’s, t’s, or f’s.

"I'm a blue guy with a shiny mohawk and I still think that might be too weird." — “I’m a blue guy with a shiny mohawk and I still think that might be too weird.”

Guardians of the Galaxy must bear inevitable comparisons to Star Wars. Sidestepping their actual relative merits, these films collectively prove that the moviegoing public are, at large, huge dorks. If you have compelling characters and a decent level of whiz bang in your FX, we’ll happily embrace whatever nonhumanoid creatures and nonsensical mythos you hurl at us.

And with no disrespect meant toward the legions of FX engineers anonymously creating cinematic wonder for our consumption, it seems that the compelling characters are the tricky part; without those you’ve got a Transformers on your hands, or the film nodded toward in GotG’s post-credits sequence.

Too often, studios conflate “compelling character” with “white dude.” And yep, there’s a bright shiny White Dude at the center of Guardians of the Galaxy, acting as the sole representative of Earth to boot. But in case you haven’t caught my “wait, seriously?” drift yet, everyone else in the movie is some variety of alien including the dynamic duo of a CYBORG RACCOON and SENTIENT TREE.

Djimon Hounsou shows up on the big screen as Korath before we get T'Challa? — Djimon Hounsou can play this alien dude but there’s still no T’Challa? Seriously?

All of which means that there’s no excuse left in the world to only make movies about the white dudes in comics. Don’t even begin to pretend with your “too unknown.” Please stop with your “not accessible to mainstream audiences.” And don’t think you’re going to get much further with Marvel Studio’s president Kevin Feige’s usual line about “timing” and “telling the right story,” because the time is obviously NOW to throw any and all Marvel pasta at the movie screen, and the “right story” is clearly irrelevant (I don’t think Guardians of the Galaxy got made because the studio just couldn’t sit on this brilliant yarn about a face-melting space ruby).

Unfortunately Feige is craftily spinning Marvel’s boon time as somehow making it even more difficult for them to release new properties:

I hope we [release a female-led film] sooner rather than later. But we find ourselves in the very strange position of managing more franchises than most people have — which is a very, very good thing and we don’t take for granted, but is a challenging thing. You may notice from those release dates, we have three for 2017. And that’s because just the timing worked on what was sort of gearing up. But it does mean you have to put one franchise on hold for three or four years in order to introduce a new one? I don’t know. Those are the kinds of chess matches we’re playing right now.

Well who would want to play a chess match with only white pieces and no queens? You need to shake up your board, Marvel. No more excuses.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who complains about this stuff a lot.

Three Reasons Why ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ is Not a Feminist Film

I dreaded seeing this trite sexism applied to Saldana’s character, Gamora. To be fair, while she does require saving by male characters on multiple occasions, Gamora has moderately strong agency throughout, and her character is a load-bearing beam rather than a Trinity-esque distraction. If only her last lines could’ve been less deferential.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), one of the summer’s most anticipated blockbusters, was released today. It was directed by James Gunn and written by Gunn and Nicole Perlman.

Guardians stars Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation) as Peter Quill, Bradley Cooper as the voice of Rocket Raccoon, Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot, Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer, and Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek) as Gamora.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read the comics and I knew nothing about the characters, their backstories, or their places in the Marvel Universe. I’m guessing that most viewers will share my ignorance. That’s OK, just go with it and let the tongue-twisters and blasters work their magic.

Make no mistake — Marvel Studios’ Avengers franchise is big business with plenty of big business oversight. Wisecracking animals, walking trees, pratfalls, space battles…it can be hard to fit in all of those beats while preserving some directorial distinctiveness. Fortunately, Gunn’s style comes through well and gives Guardians a joyful spark missing from its brethren (I’m looking at you, Iron Man 2). [Note: While writing this, I was unaware of the controversy surrounding Gunn due to the 2012 spotlighting of some awful, terrible, horrible, homophobic, misogynistic so-called satire that he spewed on his blog two years before before he was confirmed for GotG. I am now aware. The original post has long since vanished from the interwebs, but you can read about it here.]

Fans of Pratt’s Andy Dwyer will recognize the same genial man-child at the heart of Quill, but Pratt also shows that he can play the street smart pirate when necessary. More surprising is Bautista’s excellent performance as Drax. Athletes-turned-actors tend to have issues with timing and diction, but Bautista nailed it.

The most compelling characters in the movie are both animated. Rocket’s sullen abrasiveness belies palpable loneliness. Groot carries some of this sorrow as well. In the third act we learn just how strong the connection is between the two, and I was moved.

Quill is a thief and scavenger with a type of situational morality — sort of like a less violent, more personable Mal. He steals a blue orb that the Big Bad, Ronan (Lee Pace), covets. Pace lays the evil on thick, and it works. Ronan has genocidal ambitions, and wants to Death Star the peaceful planet ~~Alderaan~~ Xander. An aggressively shiny utopia, Xander looks like a cross between Dubai and a new outdoor outlet mall.

What unfolds is a standard space western, but with excellent performances, animation, and humor. It even has a female authority figure, Glenn Close (she’s the one with pieces of the set between her teeth) as Nova Prime, leader of Xander. You will be entertained. Aside from the somewhat clunky exposition sequences, I don’t really have much to criticize.

Except:

1. The first act features not one, but two disposable women. We learn that Quill suffers from parental abandonment. His father is absent, and his mother succumbs to cancer in the prologue. Later, Melia Kreiling portrays Bereet, a vaguely-alien humanoid whose key scene involves Quill shamelessly admitting to forgetting her existence even though they’d recently had sex. In the next scene (two of two for her), she speaks broken English and is servile to Quill; it struck me as an extraterrestrial variation of the Asian girlfriend trope. This was one of the few moments in the film where I actually didn’t like Pratt’s character. Unfortunately, this a-girl-in-every-spaceport sexism is leaned on for laughs throughout the film. Pratt is still playing a heterosexual white male lead, and Gunn won’t let you forget it.

2. I dreaded seeing this trite sexism applied to Saldana’s character, Gamora, the cybernetic assassin (why is it that sexy female aliens are always either green or blue?). When I saw her catsuit and a gratuitous booty shot towards the end of the first act, I felt that my fears were partly born out. To be fair, while she does require saving by male characters on multiple occasions, Gamora does display moderately strong agency throughout the film. Her character is a load-bearing beam rather than a Trinity-esque distraction. If only her last lines could’ve been a little less deferential.

More troubling are some of Saldana’s comments in recent interviews. For example, she told the Los Angeles Times that part of the appeal of the character was the chance to play someone “…so different from herself…”

“Gamora, she’s not feminine in the typical sense of how women are supposed to be. I feel like she has to melt that ice for you to find that little girl in there. She’s very tough, she’s able to relate to the hard talks of it all. When Quill comes at her with that luscious, ‘Hey baby’ [attitude], I’m pretty sure she’s throwing up in her mouth. I liked that, and I thought, ‘OK, that’s something I can incorporate of myself and just shave off a little bit of my femininity.’ Even though I like to believe I’m a tomboy, I’m very feminine, so I just always have to de-train myself and allow my masculinity to seep through because Gamora is much more masculine than I am.”

Her comments seem to imply that combat prowess and femininity are necessarily mutually exclusive, and that it’s not feminine to rebuff the advances of horny dudebros. Those connections elicited a little side eye from this critic.

3. There is a female character credited only as Tortured Pink Girl (Laura Ortiz). For some reason, Benicio Del Toro plays the sadistic Collector (kind of an older, huskier Ziggy Stardust), with whom Quill seeks to do business. We see that the Collector has enslaved at least two women; both are displayed in pigtails and pink jumpers. One is forced to wash the glass cage of the other. The woman in the cage is on her knees, bound and gagged with electric sci-fi ropes, a clear look of pain and fear in her eyes.

Quill and crew are less concerned with the fate of the women than with money and exposition. When the uncaged woman, Carina (Ophelia Lovibond), desperately attempts to use the power of an ancient artifact to free herself, she’s immolated instead. We’re left to assume that the other captive woman is also killed in the subsequent cataclysm (though a dog and an arguably misogynistic duck survive).

Despite these faults, the film is still just too good to skip. While its story and characters are hardly groundbreaking, Guardians of the Galaxy’s combination of dopey humor and frenetic action hits the sweet spot between stupid, exciting, and endearing.

Also on Bitch Flicks: The Avengers: Strong Female Characters and Failing the Bechdel Test.

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about film, television, and current events. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes:’ My Dear Forgotten Cornelia

‘Dawn’ lacks strong female characters. How much more interesting the story could have been if Ellie had taken the lead in negotiating with Caesar and restoring the dam! Likewise, a fighting female ape could have provided interesting contrast while either avoiding or spotlighting appearance-based tropes about violent women.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) is an artful and visually appealing summer blockbuster, and it almost makes up for Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). Unfortunately, like that movie and almost every other recent film in its genre, Dawn has a dearth of significant female characters.

Dawn was directed by Matt Reeves and written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. It is the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011).

Featuring much less James Franco (thank you, Noodly One) than Rise, Dawn stars Andy-Serkis-in-a-digital-monkey-suit as Caesar, Gary Oldman as Dreyfuss, leader of the surviving humans, and Jason Clarke as Malcolm, an utterly unmemorable white male lead. Keri Russell plays Ellie, a former CDC doctor and Malcolm’s companion.

The introductory news montage dovetails with the end of Rise. The Simian Flu, unleashed by Franco’s character, has killed almost everybody. A clutch of genetically-immune humans has outlasted the violent first 10 years of the apocalypse. Like characters in a late ’70s sitcom, they’re scraping by and doing the best they can in the bottom of a San Francisco high-rise.

In contrast the apes, led into the Muir Woods by Caesar in the previous film, have built a cellulose utopia. No cages, no electricity, no artisanal cat videos, no bullshit. Reeves and company do an excellent job of establishing a believable community, and of illustrating the depth of the inter-ape relationships. The father-son drama between Caesar and Blue Eyes is particularly well done, both in movement and in dialogue (such as it is), and was my favorite element of the film.

Malcolm and Ellie form a post-apocolyptic nuclear family with Malcolm’s son, Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Malcolm leads them and a small group of stock characters into the Muir Woods to locate and renovate a hydroelectric dam so that the survivors can power their peripherals. This quest precipitates the inevitable confrontation between the humans and the apes.

That's Ellie in the back. — That’s Ellie in the back.

Did I mention less James Franco? Also, the visual elements were excellent. Filming took place on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Reeves and Michael Seresin (cinematographer) really sell the lush rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. The scenery works well with the CGI and motion capture techniques, and the scenes where Caesar and family hunt and fish are beautiful and seamless.

If only the humans could have been apes. I know the film was really about the apes, anyway, but it was hard to identify with the human characters enough to care about their fate. Speaking of humans and unsympathetic characters, Gary Oldman was woefully miscast as a former military special operations badass. Judging by his stilted and unenthusiastic delivery, he wasn’t sure what he doing there, either.

Also, dystopia, again. I know, the whole series is about the fruits of war and hubris, but I’m just feeling saturated. Lately, it seems like every wide release can’t wait to tell me about how humanity is so over. What’s more, the dystopia in Dawn is not dystopic enough (if it sounds like I’m complaining out of both sides of mouth, I am). It’s too shiny, and the humans are too happy and well fed. The survivors’ colony looks more like a saturday morning farmers’ market than the last remnant of humanity. Post-tribuation San Fransico actually looks more livable covered in vegetation and sans traffic.

Similarly, the ape community is shown as a bit too idyllic (at first, anyway), and initially conveyed a subtle look-at-the-happy-natives vibe.

The movie so badly wanted to be taken seriously, but the score did not help. It alternated between ineffective back ground movie muzak and hokey homage to the cheesiest riffs of the original films. The film was best in its dark moments, and it should’ve gone darker instead of relying on poorly-aged instrumentals and noble savage tropes.

As Kyle Buchanan notes, Dawn’s dystopia is similar to its contemporaries in one important way: women need not apply. Of the many female survivors depicted, only Ellie has any lines. Almost all of which constitute her comments on or validation of the acts of Malcolm and Alexander. For example, Sam Adams references a scene where Ellie marks Malcolm’s development by saying, “That was a brave thing you did.” What little we see of her trails off to nothing in the third act as Malcolm goes adventuring solo, as a man should, apparently.

The Muir Woods don’t fare any better. It’s a bit more difficult to tell, but I reckon that the only female ape shown on screen was Caesar’s spouse, Cornelia (Judy Greer). We meet her as she gives birth (it’s a boy!) in the first act. She spends almost the entire remainder of the film in the same place, suffering and shivering from an infection contracted during the birth. As a device designed to humanize Caesar and to foster a bond between the survivors and the apes, I guess she works. As a well developed, depthful character, not so much. In fact, no one even addresses her directly — you won’t even know her name unless you stay for the credits.

Maurice, a male orangutan and Caesar’s confidant, was played by female actor Karin Konoval (she also played Mrs. Peacock in the infamous X-Files episode Home). Unlike the other male apes, Maurice doesn’t seem particularly conflict-oriented. While he acknowledges that his experience as a circus ape exposed him to the bad side of humanity, he seems to understand Caesar’s sympathy for the survivors. In one of the best scenes of the film, Alexander looks up from reading a graphic novel in his tent to see an observant Maurice quietly sitting outside. He goes to Maurice, and they read together.

Dawn was sorely missing a strong female character. How much more interesting the story would have been if Ellie had taken the lead in negotiating with Caesar and getting the dam up and running! Similarly, a fighting female ape could have provided interesting contrast while either avoiding or spotlighting appearance-based tropes about violent women.

Some critics have posited that Dawn’s lack of female characters was justified due to the film’s supposed focus on “primal urges.” Primal usually means essential or original, but apparently primal means violent when we’re talking about hominids. And women, and stereotypically feminine values like empathy and non-violence, just aren’t primal. Except that they are. Indeed, even modern male apes aren’t universally violent or paternalistic. I wonder, where were the Bonobos?

Regardless, Dawn isn’t about primal urges. Instead, it is about the physical and mental frailty of humankind. Like most other contemporary blockbusters, it reflects our modern anxieties, including our feelings of helplessness and discord — feelings held by men and women alike.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Depictions of dystopias in television and film.

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about film, television, and current events. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘One Cut, One Life’: Love, Death, and Jealousy

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in ‘My Father, The Genius,’ a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in ‘Diaries,’ in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

Artists who use their own lives as the subject matter for their art always have to make a decision about how much revelation is too much. David Rakoff, whom many know from his work on This American Life, wrote frankly and transcendentally about his declining health (including an inability in his last years to use one of his arms) after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. But Rakoff didn’t have to worry that his revelations would hurt those closest to him: he lived alone, without a partner or children.

When they reveal “everything,” those artists who are in relationships aren’t just exposing their own lives to the public–they can’t help also exposing intimate details about their loved ones. Author Ayelet Waldman has received criticism for revelations about both about her husband (author Michael Chabon) and her kids in her work. Sex writer and essayist Susie Bright swore off using her personal life as fodder for her work years ago and though she seems to be in a successful decades-long relationship (and sometimes collaborates with her now adult daughter), her writing doesn’t have the same spark as it did earlier in her career.

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in My Father, The Genius, a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in Diaries, in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

Near the beginning of their excellent documentary One Cut, One Life (which will be shown as part of the Woods Hole Film Festival July 28), Small and Pincus, each seeming to take a turn behind the camera, discuss plans to collaborate on their final film together (they had previously worked on the post-Katrina documentary The Axe In The Attic). Ed has been diagnosed with a fatal disease which would eventually turn into leukemia. Lucia is working through her grief over the deaths of two of her close friends, one from a hit-and-run driver, the other murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

Ed, who is over 70, has other health issues (he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s some years before and speaks slowly and carefully), but they agree that they can probably work around them. The problem is Ed’s wife, Jane, who is adamant that she doesn’t want them to film what might be the last months of his life. We’re so used to wives being a drag on “great” men in film (Pauline Kael referred to this role as the “‘please don’t go up to break the sound barrier tonight, dear’ type”) that we’re ready to think of Jane as the villain until she tells us, “I have enough to deal with in my life right now. My husband has received a death sentence, and I don’t see why I have to give him over to anybody else.”

Jane, who was filmed over five years in Diaries, is familiar with the intrusion a camera is in one’s day-to-day life and has no desire to relive it. She’s also insecure about Ed’s feelings for Lucia.

Ed documented his and Jane’s open marriage in the 70s, but after Diaries was completed they moved to Vermont to run a flower farm. When they made an appearance at a screening of Diaries in the 90s, with matching glasses and grey hair, their arms around each other, they seemed to have become a more conventional couple.

In the 2000s, Ed’s introduction to Lucia reignited his interest in filmmaking (though he still kept the farm). Lucia tells us that she became close to both Ed and Jane (who was a member of the feminist health collective that wrote the original Our Bodies Ourselves) during the making of Axe, but then they, by mutual agreement, distanced themselves when the film was finished. Lucia tells us that aside from a few “flings” she hasn’t been in a relationship in years and that working together for as many hours as a film takes, mixes up her feelings of love and intimacy, though she clarifies that her relationship with Ed is platonic.

Ed seems less intent on keeping boundaries clear. He tells Lucia he loves her and at one point Jane catches them alone in a situation that sets off alarm bells for her–and like photographers in a war zone, Ed and Lucia immediately pick up their cameras and start shooting the conflict. Whenever we see Lucia talking to the camera, she looks drained; the elements in her life that might distract her from her grief instead serve as reminders. Her big, black dog originally belonged to the woman who was murdered. Her cute New York apartment was the one she shared with the woman who was killed in the hit-and-run. But when Jane looks at Lucia she sees a blonde 25 years younger than she is, whom her husband seems to adore.

Mixed up in all of this drama is Ed’s worsening health. Receiving bad news on camera he simply says, ” Well, that’s sobering.” In stunning cinematography we see the seasons at the farm: fall, winter, spring, summer and then spring again, when a newly cue-ball-bald Ed tells the camera that the doctor had said he probably wouldn’t live past March, so he’s grateful. Ed lived two seasons longer and died this past November. When I saw the film in April as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston, Small did a poignant Q & A after the screening. One of the first things she told us was Jane had chosen not to attend.

One Cut, One Life Trailer from Lucia Small on Vimeo.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

When Can You Laugh at Suicide?: ‘A Long Way Down’

Suicide is no laughing matter, but we try. If it’s not a heavy drama or inspirational story telling you to stop and watch the sunset, stop and smell the roses, and the like, making a film about suicide requires a light touch and buckets of understanding and sensitivity. As a comedy plot, it only seems to work when sensitivity is disposed of completely. Suicide has been a successful plot for dark comedies, most notably ‘Heathers’ and ‘Harold and Maude’, which are full of irony, satire, insight and meditation. But ‘A Long Way Down’, a British film based on the bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, is not a dark comedy

Suicide is no laughing matter, but we try.

If it’s not a heavy drama or inspirational story telling you to stop and watch the sunset, stop and smell the roses and the like, making a film about suicide requires a light touch and buckets of understanding and sensitivity.

As a comedy plot, it only seems to work when sensitivity is disposed of completely. Suicide has been a successful plot for dark comedies, most notably Heathers and Harold and Maude, which are full of irony, satire, insight and meditation.

But A Long Way Down, a British film based on the bestselling novel by Nick Hornby, author of About a Boy and High Fidelity, is not a dark comedy (through its Wikipedia page suggests otherwise). Instead, it’s a light comedy that wears its life-changing intentions on its sleeve and comes across too obvious to be genuine.

The story begins when four very different people meet on a roof, intending to commit suicide

The film follows four people of varying ages who meet when they all try to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve. The first we meet is Martin Sharp (Pierce Brosnan), a disgraced talk show host jailed for a liaison with a 15-year-old girl (ridiculously he claims she looked 25). As his relationships with his wife and child were ruined by the scandal and he has becomes widely hated and unemployable, he plans to throw himself off a building. At the top, he meets Jess (Imogen Poots), Maureen (Toni Collette), and JJ (Aaron Paul), who had the same idea.

Politician’s daughter and club kid Jess impulsively decides to jump after being dumped by Chaz, a character so unnecessary that after one early scene, he is never mentioned again. Maureen is an anxious, religious woman existing in a world she considers crass (as exemplified by Jess), who refuses to engage with pop culture or create a life for herself outside of caring for her son. Her grown son, Matty, has severe cerebral palsy and requires constant care. Rounding out the group, JJ is a pizza delivery boy and washed-up musician who tells the group he has brain cancer so they’ll take him seriously.

Decisions in the film seem less guided by character or logic than by a map of where the plot should go to hit from point A to B. In a chain of events that would never happen in real life, the group bizarrely form a makeshift family and convince each other to stay alive until Valentine’s Day. In quick, fragmented episodes, they become the target of a media frenzy, go on a beach holiday together to escape and return to London, where hardly anything happens until the film ends and everyone’s fine. In the midst, there’s an intriguing story suggested, as the foursome inspires others to reconsider their plans for suicide by lying to the press and saying they were stopped by an angel, but the thread is quickly dropped and never returned to.

Director Pascal Chaumeil has produced a film that’s pretty to look at, and tries to be aspirational and life-changing, but ends up more being more offensive than anything else. It’s particularly irritating when a film with such sloppy storytelling and such a gross inability to create characters that feel like flesh and blood (instead of quip generators) is used in such a manipulative manner to try force an epiphany in its viewers. It’s possible A Long Way Down has good intentions; it certainly has a positive message, but it doesn’t feel like the filmmakers really put their hearts into it. The film has a lot of good points, for the most part–it’s funny and enjoyable, it hosts several capable performances, and is glossy and fluffy enough to feel like a quality picture. But it’s completely tone deaf.

The group forget their problems by goofing off together

The story aimlessly moves between characters, whiplashing from corny moments of the group splashing around in the ocean together to close-ups of the characters looking off sadly into the distance with little coherence. By the end, it’s suggested that suicidal depression can be completely overcome by a tropical vacation, goofing off and forming a wacky inter-generational friendships. Harold and Maude seems to be successful version of what the film is aiming for: an unlikely connection between two people that a gives a young person a new lease on life.

The problem with portraying a complex issue like depression in a film is that it makes it difficult to create characters that feel universally “likable,” an oft-cited necessity for a successful film. A viewer with no sympathy or personal experience is liable to find characters with clear mental health problems like Jess and JJ irritating and self-indulgent for complaining about their lack of what others might consider real problems. The film tries to counter this possibility with first person narrative, a tactic that allows the viewer a look into the characters’ heads; however, these narrations provide little else besides an opportunity to include some witty, classically Hornby lines cherry-picked from his book.

In addition, the film refuses to take Jess’s depression seriously. She clearly has some mental health issues, as she wishes she were invisible, appears slightly sociopathic and unable to relate to other people and filter out inappropriate speech, and even stalks a boyfriend to the point where he fears for his life. Add to this her severe alienation from her parents and her missing sister, the golden child, and she comes off as the most developed, relatable character. Still, her problems are played down and attributed to her merely being a dramatic teenager. It’s the same tendency we’ve seem in other media, to regard any problems felt by a privileged young woman as “first world” or “rich white girl problems.” Instead of showing us that Jess does have mental health problems despite her privileged background, she’s portrayed as a poor little rich girl who makes problems for herself.

Jess stalks the others around the city to make sure they’re following the pact

There is also a desire between the characters to give one specific reason for their suicidal intentions and for the most part it’s very easy for them to do. Martin has his blighted reputation, Maureen has the burden of caring for Matty, and Jess, because Chaz doesn’t love her. The lone exception is JJ and much his arc through the film centers around the lie he tells the others to get them to take him seriously (that he has cancer) and the accompanying depression of not having a reason for being depressed. In the last act, the other characters finally take him seriously when he goes back to the tower roof to commit suicide but any meaningful character development or recovery is overshadowed in favor of an ill-thought-out romantic relationship with Jess. The relationship comes out of nowhere towards the film’s end (they do not get together in the book), suggesting the filmmakers couldn’t imagine a platonic relationship between young attractive male and female characters, even when they appear to emotionally vulnerable for a serious relationship.

However, real-life people are more complex than that and there are often many reasons why someone might consider suicide, as well as biological and social factors, such as what support system they have in place. It is rare that it can be so easily reduced to a sentence. Rather than portray the characters as learning they are being reductive, even with JJ’s second suicide attempt, the film itself produces characters who can be easily reduced to types (Martin is slimy, Jess is manic, Maureen is restrained and JJ is a would-be rocker) and scarcely gives us any reason to see them in three dimensions. The characters’ back stories are so glossed over and devoid of context, that it’s unclear what is motivating them most of the time. For example, there is no explanation of why Martin’s children do not factor into his decision to commit suicide or why Maureen does not have the support of her family, any friends or of Matty’s father.

By the ending, on New Year’s Eve of the next year, everyone seems fixed. They still talk, but less like a support group helping each other stay afloat than four people that can barely remember why they felt so hopeless a year ago. Like I said, maybe that message has moved some viewers. It’s true that Depression is like that. You find yourself so desperate you can’t imagine living a second longer and then one day, much later, you look back and feel like a different person.

But A Long Way Down promises an unequivocally happy movie ending. These people are capital F- fixed, they’ve been in the trenches together, but they’ll never be up on the ledge again. There’s no reason to keep worrying about them or an acknowledgement of the reality that depression is a mental illness that can recur again and again. Though Jess and JJ mention being in therapy, which suggests their mental upkeep is a constant process, it doesn’t seem as important to them as the happily ever after of their romance.

At the last minute an obligatory romance develops between Jess and JJ — At the last minute, an obligatory romance develops between Jess and JJ

Likewise, Martin and Maureen’s stories are played as if they’re cured. Sadly for character development, the resolutions for both their stories take place off-screen and are never detailed. Though Martin’s reputation and job prospects are forever destroyed and people call him a pervert in the street, all is well when he gives up worrying about everything else to spend time with his kids.

Through grotesquely underdeveloped, Maureen appears to be a fascinating character, with a life we rarely see onscreen. She is raising a special needs son alone, worried about his future and burdened by the responsibility, all of which make her a complex character with an intriguing story of her own stuffed into a meandering flick where she is allowed little onscreen development.

From what we see, her life magically sorts itself out though Maureen’s routine barely changes. She saves Matty from a possibly fatal heart attack and realizes her son needs her, but of course, the burden of being his sole carer was the main reason she felt suicidal to begin with. Other than that, all she needed to fix her life was to join a quiz team and get a boyfriend.

In my opinion, A Long Way Down could have been a satisfying film. Framing it as a serious and subtly meaningful film, with black comedy to lighten the mood, could have saved it.

The core premise, of a bunch of strangers coming together, and helping each other have a better future is fairly classic and has proven itself to be a creatively fruitful jumping off point in the past. But it’s not handled capably here.

Martin, Maureen, Jess and JJ form a non-suicide pact: stay alive until Valentine’s Day

Still, I could be reading the whole thing wrong. Maybe approaching suicide with a feather-light touch has made the story more accessible and even cheered some honestly depressed real-life people. It’s possible to see how it could be moving or even inspiring that everyone gets a happy ending. But I’m a cynical person, I like my comedies dark, so A Long Way Down isn’t for me. But maybe it can help you.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Female Purity Is Some Bullshit: My Problem With ‘Ida’

Religious devotion is a tricky quality to depict in any medium: so many of us have seen piety as hypocrisy both in film and in life that we’re prepared to laugh at or to dismiss deeply held religious beliefs onscreen. In work made for mostly secular audiences, filmmakers who want to show deeply religious characters have to answer the question: if piety isn’t a joke, what exactly is it?

Sincere, spiritual belief in the Korean Zen film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (which, for long stretches is, in all but name, a silent film) is shown in very specific ways, most compellingly when the young monk pours the ashes of his teacher into the water and we see the fish start to consume them. A very different viewpoint comes from Luis Buñuel, the anticlerical director of Simon of the Desert when he shows the audience that the “goodness” and faith of religious ascetic, Simon, interferes with his ability to understand and connect with other people–which is why his efforts to improve their lives never quite hit the mark.

The title character of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) starts out as Anna, a young novitiate in Poland in 1962, ready to take her vows when her mother superior tells her she must first visit her only living relative, an aunt whom she has never met, nor even heard about before. When the aunt, Wanda (Agata Kulesza), first sees Anna at her door she doesn’t even bother greeting her, just stares at her face for an uncomfortably long time. When Anna introduces herself, Wanda tells her that she knows who she is.

Anna comes in and they talk, Wanda says “They never told you? You’re a Jew.” Anna’s parents (her mother was Wanda’s sister) were slaughtered during World War II and Anna/Ida was brought up as an orphan in the convent. Wanda shows Anna/Ida photos of her family (including Anna’s mother, who looks just like her) and asks because Anna’s hair is covered with a wimple “You’re a redhead too, aren’t you?”

Anna/Ida wishes to find out how her parents were killed and where their remains are buried, so she sets out for the small town in the countryside where they lived and died. Wanda accompanies her, chauffeuring her in the shiny car that, like her spacious apartment, fur-collared coat and tailored dresses, are a perk of being a powerful Communist Party member (she works as a judge) and provide a stark contrast to how most of the others we see in the film live.

Wanda and Ida act as good cop/bad cop with Wanda’s past as a prosecutor put to use when she interrogates those who might know where and how her sister and brother-in-law were killed, while Anna’s wimple and cross serve as entrée through doors that even Wanda’s position as a powerful Party member can’t open. One of the many things the film gets right about the period is the deference laypeople show Anna. In the 60s and early 70s, years before the sexual abuse scandals came to light, a lot of Catholics, especially older people, still looked at nuns and priests with reverence. Even as a farmer’s wife rebuffs Wanda’s efforts to find out about the death of Ida’s parents, she asks Ida to bless her baby.

The excellent Enemies, A Love Story, from the late Paul Mazursky, is one of the few other films that shows surviving European Jews living with the aftereffects of World War II’s mass genocide without, as in The Pawnbroker and Sophie’s Choice, giving us flashback scenes to the camps themselves. But Ida is different in that it takes place in the country where the genocide happened–and where we see precious little soul-searching about it. We find out Ida’s mother and father never made it to the camps, or even into the presence of a Nazi soldier or bureaucrat, but were killed, like livestock, by a neighbor. He knew no one would punish him for their deaths.

He murdered the family to gain possession of the small, run-down farmhouse we see at the start of Ida and Wanda’s search, its dinginess a testament to just how little it takes for someone to lose all morality. When Ida asks the man why he didn’t also kill her, he tells her, “You were tiny. No one would know you were a Jew,” and the arbitrariness that spared her is as bracing to us as a slap.

The film presents but never quite answers a question that still persists in places like Rwanda today: how does one continue to live with the people who wanted to kill you and all the people like you, or at least didn’t try to stop those who wanted to see you and your kind dead? Anna/Ida, without revealing her relation to them asks the town priest if he knew her parents. His answer shows a continuing indifference to them and to their fate: Jews mostly kept to themselves, he says. That indifference is something Anna/Ida might have shared before she knew who her parents were and how they died.

The black and white cinematography of the film, by Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal, is striking: at one point we see the spindly, dark trunks of trees pushing up between the gravestones in an abandoned cemetery like an Edward Gorey illustration come to life. And Ida passes the Bechdel test with flying colors (as they look for clues about her murder, the two women talk about Ida’s mother, but hardly at all about her father, whom Wanda holds responsible for her sister’s death). But a pass or fail of the Bechdel test alone doesn’t determine the worth of any film: in spite of the talent of both actresses, and the deep issues the film brings up, these two characters, in the end, inhabit unconvincing gendered stereotypes.

In the same way that some popular memes have placed men in poses adopted by women in magazine layouts to show the inherent sexism of these photo shoots, we can see how these characters are lacking by imagining the roles rewritten as men. “Adam” is scheduled to soon take his vows as a monk when he is told by one of the Brothers at the monastery that he should first visit his Uncle Waclaw, his only living relative. Waclaw tells Adam he’s Jewish: his real name is “Ira.” The uncle is a former prosecutor who degrades himself by sleeping with a lot of women and frequently getting drunk. But unless we’re seeing a film from director Steve McQueen, no male character succeeds in degrading himself by having sex with a lot of women. And hard drinking often telegraphs the man is the hero.

“Ira” never loses his temper or even cries when he encounters the evidence of his parents’ murder and the confession from the man who killed them. The closest he comes to a stand (outside of his determination to find out what happened to his parents) is a placid-faced, silent and motionless refusal to shake the hand of the farmer when he agrees to show Ira the grave in exchange for Ira dropping any claim to the farm.

The hitchhiker the uncle and Ira pick up would be the woman singer in the jazz band instead of, in Ida, the male saxophonist (the singer would feel safe alone with two men in the car because one was wearing monk’s robes) and later when the monk comes to listen to the musicians jam after their gig, the singer could tell him, looking over his smooth, wide-eyed face (as the saxophonist tells Ida) “You have no idea the effect you have on (wo)men, do you?”

As Wanda’s character could be summed up as a screwed-up “slut” (a word she calls herself and for which there is no male equivalent), Ida/Anna seems to serve as a bastion of purity. The problem with purity as ascribed to everyone from the Virgin Mary through Snow White to every dull, “good” woman rescued by “the hero” is: “pure” is a better descriptor of soap than it is of a human being. In films as in life, purity is rarely an attribute assigned to men, only to women and girls just like “strong” in the emotional sense of the word, is.

I wouldn’t categorize the two main women characters in Pawlikowski’s earlier film, the compelling My Summer of Love (its star Emily Blunt, in the role that brought her to the attention of Hollywood) as ultra-realistic either, but their actions and words seemed to have concrete (if sometimes complex) motivations: those two weren’t the opaque characters Wanda, to some extent, and Anna/Ida, especially, turn out to be. When Anna/Ida makes a life-changing decision toward the end, her expression is as serenely impassive as it was at the beginning, as if nothing had happened to her during the course of the film. Ida seems poised to forget everything she’s learned in the 80 minutes we’ve been in her company–including her own name.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhCaVqB0x0&feature=kp”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke Praise Patricia Arquette’s Performance in ‘Boyhood’

Arquette, who is terrific as Olivia, turns in a nuanced and complex performance that is vanity free. We watch her age perceptively and slowly as her character gains wisdom but still falters. In other words, she’s the kind of three-dimensional woman we rarely see in American films.

This is a guest post by Paula Schwartz.

The stars of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood–Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane–age in real time in this one-of-a-kind nearly three-hour film. Boyhood, which was shot in short annual increments over a dozen years so the effect as you watch the actors change imperceptibly and slowly is like watching time-lapse photography.

This approach would come across as a gimmick or stunt if the movie wasn’t so good. The real magic of the film is that as you watch characters grow and age, you can’t help looking back and contemplating your own life changes.

The three stars and the director of Boyhood participated at a lively press conference recently at the Crosby Hotel in SoHo to promote the film. This marks Ethan Hawke’s eighth film with the director, whose most notable collaborations include the Before Sunrise trilogy and Dazed and Confused (1993).

Boyhood tracks the life of a full-faced pouty six-year-old, Mason (Coltrane) and his older, bratty sister, Samantha, played by Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, as they grow up and mature. The story focuses on Coltrane’s character who evolves from boyhood to early manhood amid personal and family dramas, including family moves, family controversies, faltering marriages and re-marriages, new schools, first and lost loves, and good and bad times. Children of divorce, Mason and Samantha are raised by their beleaguered but devoted mother Olivia (Arquette), a hard-working woman with terrible taste in men, and her ex-husband, an immature man with a good heart but little sense of responsibility (Hawke).

Linklater described Boyhood as “this little collection of intimate moments that probably don’t fit into most movies. They’re not advancing the character enough or the story enough or the plot, but they all add up to something much bigger than each little place and each little piece of it, so that was kind of the feel to the whole movie, that it mirrors our lives.”

As to whether the film was an intimate character study or a sweeping family epic, the director said it was both. “It’s very specific and intimate but universal within that specific world. It could have been made in any country and any time. There’s such a commonality here.”

The cast and director of Boyhood — The cast and director of *Boyhood*

The film could just as accurately been entitled Motherhood or Fatherhood or Parenthood, Hawke said. He described it as “an epic about minutiae. That’s what it is. It’s difficult to title because of that. It’s a family seen through one boy’s eyes, so that title makes as much sense as any other.”

As for whether it was difficult for the actors to get back in character every year for the brief period they shot their roles, Coltrane explained, “It was a very long build up every year. We’d have a couple months to think about what we were doing and then a solid week of kind of work shopping and building the character and figuring out where the characters were that year, so by the time we got to filming we were kind of just already there.”

Hawke turned to Arquette during the press conference and told her, “I’m just throwing props your way. I’m surprised that people don’t write about more is that how awesome it is to see Patricia’s character be in this movie and to see a real woman who is a mother and a lover and more than one thing in a movie. I feel so proud to be a part of a movie that respects her character the way this movie does, and I feel it’s also sometimes so real and so true that you almost don’t ever see this in film,” he said. “It’s true in life. We see it all the time, but I don’t see that woman in movies. I don’t see her.”

“She’s in the background or just kind of in the background or ancillary elements to give some encouragement in some way to some scruffy guy. Olivia is a real, three-dimensional human being, and it was so exciting, and the women in my life who see the movie so appreciate it,” he said. ” She’s not just good, she does stupid things and smart things.”

He added, ” I just love her. You can’t pin down. One minute you go, oh she’s a good mother! No, wait, actually that was not a great decision. We’re used to people in movies being one thing, all the time.”

Arquette explained her acting technique. “In acting you have to get past your own head and your own ego and all of these fucking barriers and walls to just get to a place where hopefully you can be present enough in a scene with someone.” She added of the collaborative process, “I trusted the process. It was jumping into the void from the get-go, but when you’re in the right hands, and you jump into the void together, really great things can come of it.”

Ultimately, the director said, the movie “was always going to be a portrait of growing up but also parenting and aging. That you don’t quit growing up, especially once you’re a parent.” Hawke and Arquette’s characters are bumbling through parenting as this was happening in real life with the actors and director. “We had ourselves as parents,” Linklater said. “During this film we had five children born between us and that was just an ongoing part of life.” At the same time, “ You’re thinking of your parents once you’re a parent yourself.”

The movie mirrored what was happening in the lives of the actors and director. “We didn’t want anything to feel like it wasn’t earned or tethered to some sort of reality. I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that didn’t come out of my life or their lives,” Linklater said. His hope was that the film opened the audience up to the possibility of seeing the connection between their lives and that of the characters in the film. “Once you get to this thinking about life in general and your own life and loved ones and your own experiences, triggering all kinds of wonderful things I hope, painful and wonderful things.”

Paula Schwartz is a veteran journalist who worked at the New York Times for three decades. For five years she was the Baguette for the New York Times movie awards blog Carpetbaggers. Before that she worked on the New York Times night life column, Boldface, where she covered the celebrity beat. She endured a poke in the ribs by Elijah Wood’s publicist, was ejected from a party by Michael Douglas’s flak after he didn’t appreciate what she wrote, and endured numerous other indignities to get a story. More happily she interviewed major actors and directors–all of whom were good company and extremely kind–including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood, Christopher Plummer, Dustin Hoffman and the hammy pooch “Uggie” from “The Artist.” Her idea of heaven is watching at least three movies in a row with an appreciative audience that’s not texting. Her work has appeared in Moviemaker, more.com, showbiz411 and reelifewithjane.com.

‘They Came Together’ and the Sins of Romantic Comedy

It’s easy to look at the ads for ‘They Came Together’ and expect a straight romcom. The poster and the film are glossy and full of comedic stars. New York is so important to the story it’s like another character. The leads, Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as Molly and Joel, play exaggerations of the roles they could be cast in in any other film. She’s the big-hearted and dangerously clumsy proprietor of a quirky little candy shop that gives all its proceeds to charity, while he’s a big candy executive who dreams of a simpler life, obsesses over sex, and threatens to shut down Molly’s shop. They get together. That much is obvious once you hear it’s a romantic comedy.

It’s easy to look at the ads for They Came Together and expect a straight romcom. The poster and the film are glossy and full of comedic stars. New York is so important to the story it’s like another character. The leads, Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as Molly and Joel, play exaggerations of the roles they could be cast in in any other film. She’s the big-hearted and dangerously clumsy proprietor of a quirky little candy shop that gives all its proceeds to charity, while he’s a big candy executive who dreams of a simpler life, obsesses over sex, and threatens to shut down Molly’s shop. They get together.

That much is obvious once you hear it’s a romantic comedy.

They Came Together, the latest from David Wain and Michael Showalter, the team behind cult pic Wet Hot American Summer, intends to parody these easy conventions, and though an enjoyable film, it’s debatable what it actually accomplishes. Comedy is a difficult matter to critique as so much of what we find humorous is specific to us as individuals, as well as to factors like our culture, class, and age, that it’s nearly impossible for one person to stand up on a soapbox and declare whether or not something is funny. Adding to that, They Came Together is a polarizing film by nature. Its humor is absurdist and jokes zig and zag completely out of left field, sometimes feeling more like an extended sketch than a feature film. There are subtle visual gags, highly telegraphed centerpiece jokes, clever observations about life both in the real world and in the sunny world of the romantic comedy, plenty of raunch and some of those repetition bits that run just long enough to stop being funny and then to get funny again, thrown in for good measure. In short, it’s a comedy grab bag for which both rants and raves are justified.

Joel is given advice by friends, A-list comedians who each represent a different archetype

Much of the romcom references are bang on. The basic plot, cribbed from You’ve Got Mail, pegs an uptight man against a free-spirited woman and tells us he needs her to help him believe in his dreams, while she needs him to help her become more grounded. To stress this point, they’re even given wrong partners as contrast, ever-literal accountant Eggbert (Ed Helms) and perfectly put together Tiffany (Cobie Smulders). All the genre staples we know and are growing tired of are there: Joel gets advice from basketball playing pals who each represent a different point of view (and tell us out-right which idea they represent), they bond over their “quirky” shared tastes, in this case a love of fiction books and a hatred for the complications of modern life, spread their clothes all over Molly’s apartment while making out and fall in love through a montage that shows them buying fruit and playing in fallen leaves.

Joel and Molly fall in love through a montage of cliche activities

There are also some new and intriguing points made by the film about how race and class are portrayed in earnest examples of the genre. For existence, Molly’s assistant is Black woman who appears to have no life other than helping her, even picking up the phone in one scene and assuming the call is for Molly before even asking. Later into the film, it is revealed that Molly has a young son, and has such an easy time being a single mother that his presence in her life wasn’t even noticeable until it was pointed out. The movie fantasy of easy success and money is also briefly deconstructed in the end, when the main character’s business fails and cannot be salvaged.

With the film’s absurdist style, the plot and characters can’t really be dissected at length. But a romcom parody is particularly interesting for its power to point out annoying or offensive staples of the genre, in particular, their portrayals of women. Though a genre geared toward women, female characters in romantic comedies are uniformly portrayed as cardboard cut-outs, needy bleeding hearts or catty and conniving villains. In They Came Together, the one-dimensional nature of the female characters is pointed out as part of the joke. Molly’s business is failing because of her compulsion to give candy away and she never once thinks of changing the way she runs things. Likewise, Tiffany tells Joel point-blank that she is untrustworthy. In contrast, Joel is a complicated character who supports his younger brother, is conflicted about his job, and has strange feelings for his grandmother.

Joel’s ex Tiffany warns him to be suspicious of her morals while seducing him — Joel’s ex Tiffany warns him to be suspicious of her motives while seducing him

The difference between men and women is also boiled down to one point, that men are easy-going and order from the menu, while women are needlessly complicated (like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally) and have impossible specifications for how their food must be prepared. This idea, a common one in romantic comedies that has even bleed into real life expectations, is clearly posed as ridiculous.

But one target the film should have paid more attention to is the derision of the romantic comedy genre without our collective culture. When a new romcom opens, most of us expect it to be terrible, sight unseen. Horror films, another genre that can be cheaply and quickly made, don’t suffer the same derision, perhaps because the genre is generally geared toward a masculine audience. While bad horror is recognized as such, masters like John Carpenter and Wes Craven are still routinely praised, even by film buffs who are not major fans of the horror genre. Meanwhile, giants of romcoms like the late Nora Ephron, are seen as bi-words for schmaltzy “chick” movies no serious person would admit to liking. In my own life, I can’t recall the last time I heard a woman admit to a fondness for the likes of Sleepless in Seattle or Never Been Kissed without adding “as a guilty pleasure” in a knee-jerk reaction.

The ladies of ‘game-changing’ romantic comedy Bridesmaids — The ladies of ‘game-changing’ romantic comedy *Bridesmaids*

That was a big part of the wild success of Bridesmaids and its reputation as a game-changer: while a lot of the story presented wasn’t new, it was the first romantic comedy in a long time that we were “allowed” to like as something more than the garbage film meant for watching alone in sweatpants while nursing a carton of Hagen Daas.

Somehow it got drummed into our heads that the romantic comedy isn’t meant for us.

I’m making some wild generalizations about you as a reader here, but I’m going to guess that you’re something like me. You consider yourself smart, cynical and wary of the phase, “Well if you didn’t like it, that means you didn’t get it.” I’m not generally a fan of romcoms, but I’m starting to wonder how much of that distaste comes from the idea that they’re not “serious movies,” that they’re not worth my time, that I’m not supposed to like them. Sure, I’m turned off by the cutesy modern touches like klutzy women, quirky businesses, the plague of architect love interests (one trope missing from They Came Together) and honestly by the term “romcom” itself, but none of those things are that tied up in my ideas of modern womanhood and my comportment. I roll my eyes at them and I’m over it.

A romantic comedy where characters always succeed regardless of business sense or marketability and end up up happily ever after, is like a fairy tale to me; I don’t feel held to the expectations of women presented in them. But what I do feel constrained by is the idea of a universal taste, the final opinions formed in almost unspoken consensus that this show is a masterpiece or this show is crap, wherein anyone who disagrees loses all credibility.

Genres that cater to women are already disadvantaged in this respect as they’re seen as veering away from the universal, generally masculine path of canonized media. No matter how much important journalism or honest snapshots of our lives women’s magazines present, they’re still seen as trash. Female bloggers that write in a colloquial style that mirrors their style of speech and engages with their female readers are seen as unserious and dumb. Likewise, Girls was only acceptable as a good show after it gained the approval of young male viewers and with the approval of bro-humorist Judd Apatow.

There’s joke I’ve heard a lot recently: “I’m not like most girls”- most girls.

For most young educated women, romantic comedies are for those others, the stereotypical girl we imagine existing somewhere (basically characters played by Mindy Kaling), the one we’re deathly afraid of appearing be. We claim not to diet, we have female friends, we would never force a date to see the latest Jen Aniston movie, we call ourselves low maintenance. Sure, we want someone to love but we don’t see it as the ultimate goal in life.

But in truth? I’m sure we’ve all got “girly” things we truly love that compromise a good portion of identity. And it shouldn’t be shameful to like things that are supposed to be for women, just like shouldn’t be shameful to reject them or to like media geared toward both masculine and feminine audiences.

As in most romantic comedies, Joel and Molly have a meet cute when they wear the same costume to a halloween party

It’s probably taking things too far to say I hope They Came Together will change filmmaking or consumption; it’s a light comedic parody without activist intentions. Still, it’s the kind of film that, intentionally or not, makes you think about what we’re used to seeing on the screen and wonder why we have accepted certain ideas presented to us without complaint. Like why is one genre for women and another for men/everyone?

It hasn’t always been this way. Past romantic comedies from the 30s, even through the 90s where much of the tropes in They Came Together originated from, have been acclaimed as serious films, targeted to a universal audience and even Academy Award-ed. Many of these films were even posed from a masculine point of view, following a male character’s quest for love instead of a woman’s.

Sure They Came Together is parody, but despite its basic romantic comedy structure, it’s aimed at any audience appreciative of its brand of comedy and assumes even male viewers are familiar with the genre. Is it hopelessly naive to wish that the very existence of this film, which takes for granted that the audience will recognize romantic comedy tropes and see them as stale, will lead to some innovations?

See Also: The Romantic Comedy is Dead

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger’: A Portrait With Missing Pieces

We have to turn to documentaries to find transfeminine characters in film who are fully formed (and also actually played by transfeminine people) whether they are the stars of ‘Paris Is Burning,’ the lesser known (but still excellent) solo portrait ‘Split’ or are part of the protagonist’s life as seen in ‘Southern Comfort.’ Trans director Sam Feder’s ‘Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger’ (although it is named after Bornstein’s memoir the film is not an adaptation of the book) is the long overdue documentary on trans performer, writer and thinker Kate Bornstein (and will play as part of Outfest in Los Angeles on July 12).

When I was a kid, one of the first trans* characters (the asterisk denotes the spectrum of gender identity) I saw onscreen was at a drive-in: she used martial arts to kick the shit out of some cisgender straight guy and held a gun to the head of another. If you haven’t actually seen Freebie and the Bean (and you shouldn’t), you might think those scenes sound pretty cool, but that character (and I’m using the word loosely) is one in a long line of dangerous, deceptive, twisted trans* women. The revelation that a “man” is wearing a wig and a dress while killing or assaulting victims–as in Psycho or later in Dressed To Kill and Silence of the Lambs–is a “shocking” twist, meant to further repulse the audience.

Recent efforts haven’t fared much better: films have just traded one trope for another. Instead of the evil trans* woman we now have the suffering trans* woman whose main function is to endure whatever cruelty and degradation the filmmakers wish to throw at her in Transamerica or the recent Dallas Buyers Club, a film I haven’t seen out of principle (I was on the fringes of AIDS activism in the 90s: straight men weren’t the protagonists of that story), but which seems predicated on a trans woman suffering and acting as a human sacrifice so the formerly transphobic “straight” guy star can show the audience how compassionate and accepting he’s become.

We have to turn to documentaries to find transfeminine characters in film who are fully formed (and also actually played by transfeminine people) whether they are the stars of Paris Is Burning, the lesser known (but still excellent) solo portrait Split or are part of the protagonist’s life as seen in Southern Comfort. Trans director Sam Feder’s Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger (although it is named after Bornstein’s memoir the film is not an adaptation of the book) is the long overdue documentary on trans performer, writer and thinker Kate Bornstein (and will play as part of Outfest in Los Angeles on July 12).

Bornstein–with her trademark Anna Wintour bob, facial piercings, tattoos, and multicolored glasses–is someone whose work is as distinctive as her appearance. I’ve seen and heard her many times through the years, mostly in performances, readings and interviews, but I’ve read just a small fraction of her impressive output. So in a lot of ways, I felt like I either knew not enough or too much to be part of the intended audience for this film. Occasionally the film would tell me something I didn’t already know, as when we find out Bornstein’s first person account and resource about staying alive in spite of suicidal thoughts: Hello Cruel World was dedicated to a friend’s son who had killed himself. But more often as the film acts as a kind of “Kate Bornstein 101” we see performances and listen in on readings that are familiar to many of us. I would’ve liked more of Kate (or someone) reading the work she usually doesn’t include in her performances and readings.

The sequence in which Bornstein talks about her estranged daughter, Jessica, with the woman who is the daughter’s biological mother just left me with more questions. Both parents were Scientologists at the time and because the daughter is still active in Scientology she is forbidden from seeing Bornstein, but what of her other mother? We don’t find out, the same way we don’t find out why a pre-transition Bornstein was a single parent for part of Jessica’s very early life.

We feel the ache Bornstein has for the absence of her daughter (and grandchildren, whom she has never met) 40 years after she last spent time with Jessica. Perhaps partly because of this loss, Bornstein takes on the role of actively encouraging and nurturing younger transfolk. She says she looks forward to the world these 22-year-olds will preside over, and it’s them she’s talking about when she asserts she would like to be remembered as “someone who looked after her kids.” But in spite of the mutual love she and the younger generation of trans people have for one another, like a lot of loving parents, Bornstein seems, at times, to have trouble listening to her children. Bornstein, along with other prominent transfolk of her generation, Mx Justin Vivian Bond and Jack Halberstam defends the label “tr*nny”–but in the film she seems to confuse the word with trans identity itself, which is puzzling since Bornstein was one of the first public figures to identify primarily as “trans” instead of as a man or woman– a decision she explains during a performance/lecture captured in the film.

kate-bornsteinphotosession — Kate during a photo session

Like the other well-known trans people who wish to celebrate the word “tr*nny,” she doesn’t distinguish between being able to claim the label for herself and using it for other trans people–especially trans women–who consider the word a slur. Some who advocate for its use have likened “tr*nny” to “queer” which was also once a controversial, reappropriated label (one that still makes many straight people uncomfortable), but the difference is that “trans” can pretty much always be used instead of “tr*nny”, but “queer” isn’t always interchangeable with the more respectable “LGBT”: a lot of us who identify as “queer women” would object to being called “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or the completely clueless “gay.” A better analogous word to “tr*nny” might be “f*ggot” which some gay men call themselves but don’t wish those outside their community to call them–ever.

Bornstein has had a lot of influence, not just on younger trans people, which we see, but also on other trans writers and performers, none of whom are interviewed in the film. Instead we see repeat scenes of Bornstein in her brownstone apartment, interacting with her animals. I spend a lot of my time petting my cat and telling her how wonderful she is too, but in a fairly short film about someone with as many ideas as Bornstein has (and as many different types of lives she’s led), including more than one of these scenes seems like wasted time.

We also don’t see the sea change that has happened in the past few years: instead of white people (most of them, except for Bornstein and a few others, transmasculine) at the forefront of trans visibility and advocacy, as they were in the 1990s and 2000s, now women of color like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox are the face of the trans community. And because those women have a larger platform than writers and performers like Bornstein ever had (Mock is a former editor at People.com and Cox is featured in the wildly popular Netflix show Orange Is The New Black), more people know them, following them on Twitter and their appearances in the media. And as Bornstein has made trans suicide an issue she tries to draw attention to, Cox and Mock have both used their fame to publicize issues the mainstream media might not otherwise cover–and which white trans activists have also been slow to rally around, like the unjust imprisonment of trans women of color Cece McDonald and Jane Doe. So seeing Bornstein portrayed in a vacuum in the film is frustrating. We see her with friends, with her partner Barbara Carrellas, adoring college-age audiences and in one blink-and-you-miss-it scene the men behind Original Plumbing who acknowledge their debt to her, saying, “You came before us and carved out space.” But we don’t really see or hear prominent trans activists and public figures talk in any depth about her influence on their own work and lives–even those who have written and talked about that influence elsewhere. This omission seems especially glaring since Bornstein herself has publicly expressed admiration, on Twitter and elsewhere, for those who have come after her.

Know what makes me proud? @janetmock grand marshal #SFPride, @Lavernecox grand marshal #nycpride. Wow. #NeverThoughtIdLiveToSeeTheDay #trans

— Kate Bornstein (@katebornstein) June 30, 2014

Though Bornstein has had a litany of serious health problems in recent years, we still see her with a vaporizer pen for much of the film (she quit smoking and vaping in 2012 after a cancer diagnosis). At the end Kate faces a health crisis and comes to an epiphany. She states, “For the first time in my life I realize I want to stay…I’m doing everything I can to make that happen.” As a coda we find out her current prognosis is good. She might just live long enough to see those college kids in charge after all.

Trailer for Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger from sam feder on Vimeo.

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Editor’s note: corrections have been made from the original review, which made it sound as if Bornstein continued to smoke after a cancer diagnosis; she quit the day she found out.

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